By Peter Kear
The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) motion last week, asking for the renaming of Sir John A. Macdonald schools, has been a very effective and a polarizing strategy – maybe a ploy – for creating a heated national conversation around a dark chapter in our recent past: the creation in the 1880s of the federal residential school system for Indigenous children, and the resulting collateral damage for their families and their culture over the last 100-plus years.
BUT beware, logically the same argument put forward by the ETFO motion could be used to question the appropriateness of having schools etc. named after such former prime ministers as Sir Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King concerning their just-as-racist (though not genocidal) Chinese ‘head tax’ and the Chinese Immigration/Exclusion Act of 1923, which were both based on a fear of an anticipated onslaught of the ‘yellow peril’.
The Chinese ‘head tax’ was initiated by the Macdonald Conservative government in 1885 ($50), increased to $100 in 1900 by the Laurier Liberal government, and again increased to $500 in 1903 (the equivalent of two-years’ pay for an average worker at the time) by the Laurier government.
In 1923 when xenophobia and the racist KKK were rampant throughout Canada during the traumatic and racially toxic post-First World War era, the Liberal government under Mackenzie King – supported by the Official Opposition under Conservative leader, Arthur Meighen – legislated the Chinese Immigration/Exclusion Act, which remained on the books until 1947.
In this current debate, we should be cognizant of the fact that Sir Wilfrid Laurier vastly expanded the residential school system under his watch as prime minister between 1896 and 1911. In addition, his government suppressed the devastating 1907 report by Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, Ontario’s first public health officer, who had thoroughly documented the high incidence of deaths among the Indigenous children in the western Canadian residential schools, the result of over-crowding, poor housing, and the associated diseases of tuberculosis and typhus; plus malnutrition, the result of cost-cutting initiatives. The Laurier government then terminated any additional funding for continued research on the part of Dr. Bryce and his staff, all evidence of Laurier’s complicity in maintaining Macdonald’s residential school system, designed to ‘kill the Indian in the child’.
As a former secondary school history teacher and more recently as a history education instructor, I believe it is vital to have thoughtful, civil conversations about our past, ‘warts & all’, but we must be reflective and very prudent about renaming, removing and erasing personalities/events from our collective past. It’s a slippery slope to a 1984 Orwellian-type world.
Instead, we should channel the looming highly-divisive and emotionally-charged debates around proposed school name changes and the money spent – with the help of expensive consultants, no doubt – into worthy initiatives addressing access to clean water and much needed mental health resources for our Indigenous communities.
At the education level, we can direct our focus on better equipped and resourced Canadian history classrooms, which will foster empathy, critical/historical thinking skills, and inquiry-based learning around these dark chapters and forgotten stories, which until recently have been omitted from our curriculum documents.
And yes, students – as well as political leaders – must be reminded that a latent form of racism or an explicit race/ethnic-based political ideology have been harbingers of genocide in the recent past as witnessed by the horrific events of the 20th century, lest we forget.
Peter Kear is a former Huntsville High School history teacher and, more recently, a history education instructor.
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Azeezah Kanji has an excellent and an informative article in today’s Toronto Star (‘Defending Macdonald erases history twice’) but she misses the mark when in the last paragraph she claims that those who raise the issue of ‘presentism’ in the current debate around renaming schools are ‘treating the perspectives of a handful of powerful white men as the only relevant ones for understanding the past.’
By making this claim, Ms. Kanji appears to be woefully uniformed as to the significant and substantial education changes that were mandated in the revised 2013 Ontario curriculum documents pertaining to the teaching of Social Studies and History in our province.
One of the major thrusts of the 2013 curriculum documents were the concepts of ‘diversity’ and ‘diverse perspectives,’ and that ‘Students learn that Canada has many stories and that each one is significant and requires thoughtful consideration.’ (2013 Ontario Curriculum, Social Studies, History and Geography, 11)
As now mandated, students within our schools are introduced to, and hopefully have a deeper understanding of Canada’s past other than from the ‘perspectives of a handful of powerful white men.’
I received my secondary education at Sir Winston Churchill High School. It still exists; but on the basis of what we now know, perhaps “the greatest good for the greatest number” should not be a philosophy worthy of veneration either.
It’s my hunch that a vast majority of Sir John A. Macdonald schools were named in his honour in the early to mid-1960s during the lead up to our centennial when Canadians were celebrating the ‘Road to Confederation’ (the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences of 1864, the London Conference of 1866) and preparing for EXPO 67 in 1967. It was also a time when the Great Men interpretation of the past was still in vogue.
But it should also be remembered that during this period of preparation and celebration, Canada’s future was very much in question. Quebec – and Canada as a whole – was experiencing the wide-sweeping Quiet Revolution, which turned not-so-quiet in the early 1960s with the first wave of the terrorist FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) planting and exploding bombs in mailboxes, commercial and federal government buildings, on railway tracks, and damaging monuments which had any British colonial or federal connection in Quebec. It was also the time of the emotionally charged and divisive Flag Debate in Canada.
Hence, there was an existential need to draw on the ‘great nation-builders’ interpretation of our collective past. The issue of the federal Indigenous residential school system and its role in fostering ‘cultural genocide’ was still an ignored and largely forgotten dark chapter in our national narrative.
Right on!
Yes, I’m not sure how the topic of statues came up, unless commenters are talking about what’s happening south of the border. This opinion isn’t about that.
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I don’t know that the ETFO motion is a ploy to create a heated national conversation about the residential school program, rightly called a dark chapter in our history, but I’d say so long as that conversation remains heated, it needs to continue. This is how “truth and reconciliation” is done. Grit your teeth and accept the truth, perform the reconciliation — and the need for heatedness is gone.
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My feeling is that the motion more likely arose out of concern about the possibility — or perhaps the actuality, as this might well have happened — that students, learning about the residential school program, its intent of cultural genocide and who founded it, might ask, “If he did that, why is our school named after him?” (Especially students of First Nations extraction.) As any parent knows, kids are very good at spotting the contradictions adults have learned to blind ourselves to. They are also well aware that having something named after you is an honour, not a history lesson (Sir John A. is hardly going to disappear from the curriculum) — and if it’s a school in particular, that the honouree is being held up as a role model to them.
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If we answer youngsters who ask the above question, “That’s how things were back then (i.e. such racism was socially acceptable)”, they would be right to counter, “But his name is on my school *right now*.”
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Hugh and others need to be clear on the distinction between revision — altering the facts of history as it is taught — and choices in whom to honour and hold up as a role model. By changing the name of a school we are not altering any facts; we are altering who we think is honourable and whom we want our kids to emulate, which is a subjective decision, not an objective outcome. Again, Sir John A. is hardly going to disappear from Canadian history as it is taught, as his role was far too important; to suggest otherwise because schools change their names is silly, really. Ditto Laurier & King, and any other major player, whatever warts they had.
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In other words, what we may not alter is the facts of the lives and actions of historical figures. Our opinion of them is fair game.
Words of wisdom by a prolific Canadian historian on the role of studying and uncovering the past in the present, as we contemplate the future:
“History is important because it helps people know themselves. It tells them who they were and who they are; it is the collective memory of humanity that situates them in their time and place; and it provides newcomers with some understanding of the society in which they have chosen to live … of course, the collective memory undergoes constant revision, restructuring, and rewriting, but whatever its form it reveals anew to each generation a common fund of knowledge, traditions, values, and ideas that help to explain our existence and the mistakes and successes of the past.”
(J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History?, 1999, p.5)
With respect to fellow posters, no one is taking down statues. No one is saying that John A MacDonald has not earned a respected place in history or that his legacy needs to be cleansed. The issue is whether or not his name belongs on schools. To this: I say NO.
The residential school system was instigated by JAM with the historically established intention of killing the culture, language and traditions in people where killing the people was proving impractical. The legacy of this — owned by EVERY Canadian Prime Minister until 1996 — is one of tragedy.
It is inappropriate that his name continue to be on educational institutions because the association is not one of aspiration — but of subjugation.
Hearty congratulations to Peter Kear for his masterful dismissal of the crass abuse of history by the bed-wetters at the ETFO.
History is what it is, good, bad or even ugly.
Read about it.
Learn it and, more importantly, learn from it.
Learn to live with it too as you can’t change it without a really good time machine and so far even Apple does not have one of these for sale!
The value of old statues is just to remind us of our history, they don’t make any effort to say it was “correct” and then what is “correct” now is quite a lot different from what was considered so 100 years ago.
Leave the statues alone please.
A cogent and very erudite article. I would very much enjoy more of this writing on Huntsville Doppler. Please submit more, Mr. Kear, if you would be so inclined.
The Truth & Reconciliation commissioners made 94 recommendations to help our country move forward in reconciliation, several of which speak to the role of education. Specifically, #63 calls for curricular materials that are culturally sensitive & responsible to educate Canadian students about the residential schools & their legacy – now mandated within the 2013 Ontario curriculum documents for Social Studies/History, with over 100 entry points within the documents!
‘STOLEN LIVES’ (2015) produced by Facing History & Ourselves – & endorsed by many Indigenous resource people, including Theodore Fontaine, a member of the Sagkeeng Anishinaabe First Nation, who writes the Forward for ‘STOLEN LIVES’ – is now available in PDF format (200 resource pages plus) to all teachers in Ontario, & the public, at: https://www.bwdsb.on.ca/AB_Ed/Stolen_Lives.pdf
Thank you for your thoughts Peter. History as it is remembered, documented from 360 perspectives etc. is a tool used to teach us for our future. We can’t relive history; only learn from it.
Well done, Peter. The politically correct are subverting a positive agenda of reconciliation by ignoring the reality of the times, without using the opportunity of a reasoned discourse to acknowledge how far we have progressed.
I see no logic whatsoever in taking down our First Prime Minister Statue…..Work to improve the Math scores in Ontario…..That is Logical !